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after trying ubuntu for a month (had it installed on my desktop pc, wubi install) I decided to get mint 14 on my laptop for good. however after installing from a usb stick, the laptop would go straight to win7 without the menu as in my desktop pc.I was just able to fix this by using boot repair.Apologies for my noob question but now when I boot the pc and GRUB comes up, I get mint as my first option and then 2 or 3 additional options for windows(none of them says win7) I tried one that read something similar as "windows efi boot" I tried it and it all looks fine, but just want to make sure that it is booting to my "regular windows" sorry If this is a dumb question but as you might ralize I'm not exactly a tech.I was expecting something similar as my laptop pc wher it only says "ubuntu" or "windows 7", so basically just ant to check that this list is the usual GRUB one and not something as consecuence of a bad install and also confirm that I won't have any issues running windows that way

I'm having trouble understanding your issue. To clairify, do you have both Windows 7 and Mint installed on your internal hard drive? You plan to dual boot? And you cannot access your Windows installation?

If you're having a problem booting one OS or the other, then you need to elaborate on what's wrong. Running the Boot Info Script in Linux (even from an emergency disc) and posting the RESULTS.txt file it produces (as a link or within code tags) will help us track down what's wrong.

If, OTOH, you're booting both OSes and they're both working to your satisfaction, then it's fine. Linux can't "fake" Windows well enough to make you think you're running your regular installation when in fact you're running something else. All you're seeing when you start up is the GRUB2 menu, which is a boot manager -- a program that gives you choices of what to boot, before any OS launches. A boot manager is a practical requirement on a computer that boots more than one OS. If you don't like the "look" of GRUB2, or if it's misbehaving in some way, then there are other options. It sounds like you're booting in EFI mode, so you may want to check out my EFI Boot Loaders for Linux page, which runs down your options.

Thanks for your replies, actually both OS's (win7, mint) boot correctly, I was just wondering as on my other pc where I have win7 and ubuntu(installed via wubi)the boot manager has "windows 7 and ubuntu" as options which looks more user-friendly(at least for new users)I was just scared as I had 3 different "options" for win7 and none of them is actually called "windows 7"

There are tools to help manage the GRUB 2 menu, but I'm not very familar with them. Also, I'm not sure how they'd cope with an EFI installation, which you seem to have.

Once again, though, if you're not happy with the GRUB 2 menu, you could look at some of the alternatives. At the very least, it won't hurt to read up on them. You can test any of them by installing them to a USB flash drive or CD-R, without touching or endangering your current configuration. (In fact, rEFInd is available as a bootable CD-R image file.)